August 10 2004

Q: What trends are you seeing in
the enterprise portal development?
A: The early portal products were pretty much focused on providing aggregated
information and applications to users. We can now see a shift toward more
advanced workplace technology and business process integration. Through
workplace technology based on portals, as delivered in Lotus Workplace,
users can collaborate more efficiently through additional functions such
as team collaboration, instant messaging and Web conferencing, all integrated
in one workplace offering. Business Process Integration in portals provides
additional value, since it allows end users to participate in business
processes without really having to know the processes they participate
in. As such, the portal automatically finds out which tasks are pending
for each user and lists those tasks in a personal task list from which
the end user can launch the tasks. The portal will then automatically display
the right page with the right applications to work on the launched task
to the user.